VMware woos power users and IT pros with Fusion and Workstation upgrades

Bid to unseat Parallels plays to VMware's enterprise strengths.

VMware has generally played second fiddle to Parallels in the market for running Windows virtual machines on the Mac, an arena largely consisting of home users. But VMware has never been an also-ran in the enterprise, where its top-notch server and desktop software has made the virtualization vendor a giant for most of its 15-year history.

The company began merging its enterprise chops with its consumer virtualization tools one year ago with a professional version of Fusion, its software for running Windows and other operating systems on OS X. The pro version has all the same capabilities as the base Fusion platform, along with tools for IT shops to securely provision virtual machines to employees and contractors.

With Fusion 6, a new product that's being announced today, VMware is making Mac virtualization even more IT-friendly. VMware today is also releasing version 10 of Workstation, the desktop virtualization platform designed for power users on Windows and Linux. Notably, Workstation now has a virtual accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and ambient light sensor. This will make it easier for developers to test applications on Windows 8 tablets.

Fusion 6 Professional gives IT shops more options in deploying restricted virtual machines than Fusion 5 did. For example, a virtual machine can be set to expire on a specific date and time, useful for providing VMs to contractors or for using VMs to show demos of software to people outside the company. Also, a new "single virtual machine mode" can be enabled to prevent users from creating new virtual machines or accessing features IT shops would prefer they not touch.

Fusion 6 Pro adds "linked clones," in which multiple copies of a virtual machine can be created without duplicating the entire thing. This feature, borrowed from Workstation, saves a lot of disk space. Developers could use this to test applications on various configurations of an operating system without using nearly as much storage as they otherwise might.

Upgrades to Fusion that apply to both the home and professional versions include support for OS X Mavericks as a host operating system and for Windows 8.1 as a guest OS. It's not that you can't run Fusion 5 with Windows 8.1 or Mavericks, it's just that Fusion 6 can better take advantage of the operating systems' new capabilities.

Mavericks' upgrades for users with multiple monitors come into play here. Fusion could already run Windows on multiple displays in previous versions, but with Fusion 6 it can use an HDTV connected to an Apple TV as a Windows display via the AirPlay wireless technology, VMware product marketing manager Nicolas Rochard told Ars. Fusion 6 can also use Mavericks' enhanced dictation abilities in Windows virtual machines.

With Windows 8.1 as a guest on Fusion 6, users can run "Windows Store [i.e. Metro] applications side-by-side with your Mac applications," VMware said in its announcement. "With Fusion 6, you can access Windows Store applications in Launchpad or the Applications folder and put them in the dock in Unity mode."

Enlarge/ Almost like a Start menu, Fusion provides easy access to applications within virtual machines from the Mac's menu bar.

VMware

Fusion 6 has upgrades designed to take advantage of the latest Intel chips and solid-state drives on Mac hardware. "We let Windows 8 virtual machines know when they're running on an SSD so they don't have to perform unnecessary disk defragmentation tasks," Rochard said.

Virtual machines can now be bigger than ever before, with up to 16 virtual CPUs, 8TB of virtual disk space, and 64GB of memory. Previously, the limits were 8 CPUs, 2TB of disk, and 8GB of memory. There are also some user interface tweaks to make installing virtual machines easier.

As a bonus, Fusion Professional comes with VMware Player 6 Plus. This is a commercially licensed version of Player, a virtualization product for Windows and Linux that is traditionally free, but authorized only for home use. With Fusion Pro and Player Plus, IT shops can create restricted virtual machines in Fusion and deploy them to either Fusion or Player, covering Macs, Windows, and Linux.

This provides a secure way to let businesses support some of those Windows XP applications that just won't go away. "We expect to be very interesting to many customers who are facing the end of life of XP," VMware Workstation Director Jason Joel told Ars. "In April, Microsoft will no longer support XP. The good news is XP will run very well in a virtual machine. We expect to run Windows XP basically forever."

Workstation, the granddaddy of them all

A desktop virtualization product for Windows and Linux, Workstation is the product that got it all started for VMware in 1999, a year after the company's founding. Fusion and Workstation both use the same virtualization engine that ships with vSphere, VMware's flagship product for server virtualization, Joel said. But Workstation is generally targeted at an audience with higher technical requirements than Fusion's, such as developers and software engineers.

Workstation 10 supports virtual machines with up to 16 virtual CPUs, 8TB of disk, and 64GB of memory, just like Fusion. One interesting addition comes in the form of tablet sensors, "the first ever virtual accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and ambient light sensor to enable applications running in a virtual machine to respond when a user juggles their tablet," VMware said. This is in addition to multi-touch support added last year.

"With these sensors available, you are able to create and run all your position-aware applications," Joel said. "If you put Marble Madness into a virtual machine and run it on a Surface Pro, you can tilt the Surface Pro around and your marble will respond appropriately."

This feature is designed mostly for building Windows tablet applications. Android isn't officially supported by VMware, but Joel said users can install Android on Workstation if they're willing to do a little manual configuration.

Expiring virtual machines and the SSD integration in Fusion also make their way into Workstation 10. Other new Workstation features include a virtual SATA controller and improved support for USB 3, which should speed up large file transfers.

VMware boosted the number of virtual networks that can be created with Workstation to accommodate the complex deployments that its customers need. Customers are building "entire cloud environments or VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] environments, or even hybrid ESX/Hyper-V combinations that they're trying to develop operational software for," Joel said. There are also "complicated configurations with load balancers, and with firewalls and multiple storage systems and multiple database/Web server configurations."

Workstation, like Fusion, supports all the latest Linux distributions. But the big driver is Windows 8.1, Joel said. "When Windows 8 originally launched, we got very few questions about it," he said. "But since the 8.1 preview has come out, we've seen a tremendous amount of growth in the number of people using it as well as the number of questions we're getting, and feedback we've received on the enhancements we've put in for 8.1 support. We have added support for the metro apps, putting them in the Unity menus, and we've added support for conversion of physical to virtual Windows 8 machines, which is something we haven't had previously."

How much it all costs, showdown with Parallels

Fusion 6 will be available today from VMware's website for $59.99, while Fusion 6 Professional will cost $129.99. People who bought Fusion 5 on August 1 or later can upgrade for free. Upgrades from Fusion 4 and 5 cost $49.99 (or $69.99 to upgrade to Fusion 6 Pro).

While Fusion 6 Pro comes with Player Plus, this version of Player will also be sold on its own for $99. This may help VMware recoup some money from consumers who have used Fusion for work, perhaps not knowing that it wasn't licensed for commercial use. "We very well know there are millions of people out there who have [done that], and our intent is to provide them with a path to become legitimate," Joel said.

Workstation 10 will cost $249 for new buyers, with upgrades from Workstation 8 or 9 costing $119. Anyone who bought Workstation 9 on August 1 or later can upgrade for free.

As is typical, VMware rival Parallels released the latest version of its virtual machine software for Macs last week. In our detailed showdown of Parallels and Fusion last year, Ars writer Dave Girard wrote that Parallels justified its higher price with "solid performance, far superior Linux OpenGL support, and existing feature set."

Stay tuned for another Parallels vs. Fusion showdown after Dave has spent his usual copious amounts of time testing every possible detail of the two products.

Promoted Comments

If anyone from VMware is reading this, I have 2 simple requests of VMware Workstation.

1) Keep up with Linux kernel releases. Give us small patches to keep things running. The community ones work... most of the time, but official support would be better.

2) Add support for hardware video acceleration for Linux hosts. I've read some people getting it to work by jumping through some hoops, but it's a long road with no guarantees. Don't forget some people run Bumblebee.

54 Reader Comments

Not unhappy with the upgrade pricing. I'll be putting in an order for a couple of licenses here at work, but will probably upgrade my personal license at home within the next few days. Fusion + 10.9 + AppleTV = happy camper, able to work on my stuff at night while watching TV at the same time.

Went ahead and upgraded to Fusion 6. Windows 8 feels a little smoother so maybe the near-native performance advertisement on their site was right, still too early to tell. On a side note, does anyone really use unity for any serious work? I've always thought it was a nice idea but it's never worked well for me in practice so I end up just running full screen. Just curious.

Went ahead and upgraded to Fusion 6. Windows 8 feels a little smoother so maybe the near-native performance advertisement on their site was right, still too early to tell. On a side note, does anyone really use unity for any serious work? I've always thought it was a nice idea but it's never worked well for me in practice so I end up just running full screen. Just curious.

I prefer full screen as well. If I'm going to do Windows, I might as well get the whole experience.

Went ahead and upgraded to Fusion 6. Windows 8 feels a little smoother so maybe the near-native performance advertisement on their site was right, still too early to tell. On a side note, does anyone really use unity for any serious work? I've always thought it was a nice idea but it's never worked well for me in practice so I end up just running full screen. Just curious.

I dont use Unity either. I just use a dual monitor setup and keep Win 7 running in full screen most of the time. Thinking about upgrading to 6 for performance reasons alone. I run SQL Server, Visual Studio, IIS and a few other smaller things in Windows. So any performance boost will always be welcome.

If anyone from VMware is reading this, I have 2 simple requests of VMware Workstation.

1) Keep up with Linux kernel releases. Give us small patches to keep things running. The community ones work... most of the time, but official support would be better.

2) Add support for hardware video acceleration for Linux hosts. I've read some people getting it to work by jumping through some hoops, but it's a long road with no guarantees. Don't forget some people run Bumblebee.

I started out with Parallels and then jumped to VMWare when Fusion was first released. Parallels seemed to engage in some slimy practices, releasing new and pricey updates yearly, frequently putting in major bug fixes or features necessary to work with a new OS X release in those major updates. VMWare had a slower release cycle, better support for previous versions, and very fair upgrade pricing.

That changed with version 4. The "upgrade pricing" was the full price, with the promise that the full price would increase after a few months. It seems that VMWare is now also on an aggressive upgrade schedule with pricier costs. I suppose that the product matured and that justifies the higher prices, but I wish software update support lasted a bit longer, and that versions lasted for more OS versions...

I also switched from Parallels to VMWare a few years ago when a new Mac OS X version broke compatibility and Parallels only 'solution' was to upgrade. I very much hope this yearly release cycle from VMWare doesn't mean they're going into the same direction.

I am running Unity most of the times and have my desktop spread across three screens. There are sometimes problems with that (a window from Unity would not drag properly to a particular screen and/or resize) but very often a restart of both the host & VMWare Fusion 5 would solve that. But in general it works and I'm glad Unity exists for that one application I need that is Windows only.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let alone switching to Win 8, a tablet or a Mac.

Would buying a new laptop, installing VMWare or Parallels, and installing Win Xp on it essentially give him a new XP computer? I realize how much of a kludge this is, but forcing him to learn a new OS is off the table. I'm also aware of XP's imminent end-of-life, but I can deal with that eventually.

Fusion 6 Pro adds "linked clones," in which multiple copies of a virtual machine can be created without duplicating the entire thing. This feature, borrowed from Workstation, saves a lot of disk space. Developers could use this to test applications on various configurations of an operating system without using nearly as much storage as they otherwise might.

This is something I'm very happy to see. While ZFS deduplication can replicate some of space saving features, it's got higher overhead and doesn't have the clean management or ongoing links that a built-in solution does. Having multiple clone VMs to do testing, sandboxing, and so on is quite handy when convenient enough, and is one of the features that has an entirely direct instant payoff too, since for a large enough number of VMs the upgrade price would be less then the cost of the drive space saved.

Looking forward to seeing an updated faceoff over 3D performance as well. Though VMware appears for now to have ceded leading edge development in that area to Parallels they are promising "higher performing graphics-based applications" with Fusion 6, so presumably it's had some additional work done. I'm curious what the performance difference is, though Linux support of course remains a glaring weakness for those who want it.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let switching to a tablet or a Mac.

While it doesn't answer your question, let me share this with you: My grandfather was in the same situation when he was approaching 75 and not very enthusiastic about learning something new. I ignored it, bought him a Mac and he's been over the moon since having learnt to make photo books and other things he never thought possible. Don't underestimate the joy and motivation that can come from learning something useful (as opposed to learning something that just replaces what I already knew).

And in case this sounds like lots of work on my part teaching all that: Apple's One on One program has very, very patient teachers.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let switching to a tablet or a Mac.

Would buying a new laptop, installing VMWare or Parallels, and installing Win Xp on it essentially give him a new XP computer? I realize how much of a kludge this is, but forcing him to learn a new OS is off the table. I'm also aware of XP's imminent end-of-life, but I can deal with that eventually.

My personal recommendation on that--if he's determined to run winXP.... you almost have to go the VMWare route (or parallels). Parallels I believe requires a mac, while VMware can run on both platforms.

But the key is to only let him use a virtual machine that can be rolled back easily. I am not sure of the applescript support for either of these products, but you could whip up a script that saves his documents every day that are new and then rolls back the virtual machine to a working state. Every day. Thus, leaving his machine in a working state.

My question here is : where, exactly, are people getting legit copies of win XP nowadays to install in these virtual machines? Or Vista or 7 for that matter. I'd love to run windows, but I've never found a semi decent way to be legitmate and run Windows without coughing up hundreds of dollars for licenses that expire if you need to reinstall (and you will with a testing virtual machine)--how do people deal with that?

Would buying a new laptop, installing VMWare or Parallels, and installing Win Xp on it essentially give him a new XP computer? I realize how much of a kludge this is, but forcing him to learn a new OS is off the table. I'm also aware of XP's imminent end-of-life, but I can deal with that eventually.

Do NOT do it.

My Dad is the same. I set up the new computer and gave him some instructions, but he kept complaining how things are different. So I had to leave the old computer next to the new one.

But after getting frustrated with the old slow computer, he himself slowly started using the new one. It took a few months, but he now uses the new one exclusively.

I wish they would just remove all the Mac/Windows integration altogether. The Open With menu gets littered will all sorts of useless garbage, the dock and menu bar get littered with garbage, and Unity is just frustrating to deal with.

The only users I can fathom liking these features are users like my parents who are so confused by the concept of a VM anyway that Unity just pushes the confusion to a whole new level.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let switching to a tablet or a Mac.

While it doesn't answer your question, let me share this with you: My grandfather was in the same situation when he was approaching 75 and not very enthusiastic about learning something new. I ignored it, bought him a Mac and he's been over the moon since having learnt to make photo books and other things he never thought possible. Don't underestimate the joy and motivation that can come from learning something useful (as opposed to learning something that just replaces what I already knew).

And in case this sounds like lots of work on my part teaching all that: Apple's One on One program has very, very patient teachers.

Appreciate the feedback. My dad is the same age as your grandpop. Encouraging to hear that he's enjoying the Mac. That's my preferred route, as I've been dealing with Apple stuff for nearly 2 decades now (ugh.) If something goes wrong, either I can fix it, or he has an Apple Store practically across the street from him.

He showed some slight interest in Apple when one of his drinking buds praised them up and down the street. I think at the end of the day, he wants to stay with Windows. I'm fine with that, but Windows 8 has obviously been a huge issue for people (for the record, I think it's decent.)

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let switching to a tablet or a Mac.

Would buying a new laptop, installing VMWare or Parallels, and installing Win Xp on it essentially give him a new XP computer? I realize how much of a kludge this is, but forcing him to learn a new OS is off the table. I'm also aware of XP's imminent end-of-life, but I can deal with that eventually.

My personal recommendation on that--if he's determined to run winXP.... you almost have to go the VMWare route (or parallels). Parallels I believe requires a mac, while VMware can run on both platforms.

But the key is to only let him use a virtual machine that can be rolled back easily. I am not sure of the applescript support for either of these products, but you could whip up a script that saves his documents every day that are new and then rolls back the virtual machine to a working state. Every day. Thus, leaving his machine in a working state.

My question here is : where, exactly, are people getting legit copies of win XP nowadays to install in these virtual machines? Or Vista or 7 for that matter. I'd love to run windows, but I've never found a semi decent way to be legitmate and run Windows without coughing up hundreds of dollars for licenses that expire if you need to reinstall (and you will with a testing virtual machine)--how do people deal with that?

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding XP, we still have the gen-you-wine XP install DVD. I'm guessing other people are bootlegging XP. Have no idea.

Would buying a new laptop, installing VMWare or Parallels, and installing Win Xp on it essentially give him a new XP computer? I realize how much of a kludge this is, but forcing him to learn a new OS is off the table. I'm also aware of XP's imminent end-of-life, but I can deal with that eventually.

Do NOT do it.

My Dad is the same. I set up the new computer and gave him some instructions, but he kept complaining how things are different. So I had to leave the old computer next to the new one.

But after getting frustrated with the old slow computer, he himself slowly started using the new one. It took a few months, but he now uses the new one exclusively.

I wish they would just remove all the Mac/Windows integration altogether. The Open With menu gets littered will all sorts of useless garbage, the dock and menu bar get littered with garbage, and Unity is just frustrating to deal with.

You can disable this integration under the VM Default Application settings and you can turn off further integration under the VMware settings. I agree, it pollutes the host OS and I have these features turned off.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let alone switching to Win 8, a tablet or a Mac.

Would buying a new laptop, installing VMWare or Parallels, and installing Win Xp on it essentially give him a new XP computer? I realize how much of a kludge this is, but forcing him to learn a new OS is off the table. I'm also aware of XP's imminent end-of-life, but I can deal with that eventually.

EDIT: I guess Classic Shell is another option.

The transition from XP to 7 is just as hard as the transition to Linux. If he doesn't need Windows for some really expensive commercial software, why not switch to Linux now? Either LXDE or XFCE interfaces are very much like the XP interface. He won't have any issues - my 80 yr old Mother switched 3 yrs ago. To the uninformed, you can swap desktop environments with just a few commands, or grap Lubuntu or Xubuntu 12.04.3 and install that. Stay with the LTS releases if you are new to Linux - newer is NOT always better.

Linux isn't for everyone, but it doesn't demand hardware upgrades with every new OS release - perfect for older folks. Mom was running on a P4 until it died. I pulled the HDD, dropped it into a new Core i7, booted. Everything was just as before. Migrating between machines is pretty trivial with Linux - either physical or virtual machines.

Mom needed 1 costly program to run under Windows (lots of odd OCXs), so I installed VirtualBox (Linux host) and a WinXP VM. Worked perfectly, plus remote management of Liunx is much, much, much easier than for Windows, IMHO. Ssh rocks completely.

But after getting frustrated with the old slow computer, he himself slowly started using the new one. It took a few months, but he now uses the new one exclusively.

It just takes them longer....

We went for the method of getting my grandfather a new laptop and an iPad within a couple months. My grandmother swiped the iPad from him, so he started going through the migrate to the new computer, but watching in envy at how much easier it was for my grandmother to use the iPad. She used to not touch the computer other than opening AOL for mail, and here she was browsing, sharing pictures, planning routes...

So we bought her own iPad, and my grandfather got his back, and now neither computer really gets used. I don't think the Garmin gets used either now that we got them a chartplotting app and a Lifeproof case.

I used VirtualBox for a couple years before switching to Fusion. Then just a couple months ago, I was working on a flight and noticed that Fusion insisted on using the discrete video card on my MacBook Pro, rather than the lower-power integrated video. I got about 90 minutes of work in before my battery was gone. VMWare support confirmed there was no workaround for this, and couldn't give me a date when they'd offer this feature, so I switched to Parallels. Still can't tell from the info on the new Fusion release if the new version is able to use integrated video. I've been happy with Parallels, and both Parallels and Fusion seem to offer comparable features for my uses.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let switching to a tablet or a Mac.

While it doesn't answer your question, let me share this with you: My grandfather was in the same situation when he was approaching 75 and not very enthusiastic about learning something new. I ignored it, bought him a Mac and he's been over the moon since having learnt to make photo books and other things he never thought possible. Don't underestimate the joy and motivation that can come from learning something useful (as opposed to learning something that just replaces what I already knew).

And in case this sounds like lots of work on my part teaching all that: Apple's One on One program has very, very patient teachers.

Appreciate the feedback. My dad is the same age as your grandpop. Encouraging to hear that he's enjoying the Mac. That's my preferred route, as I've been dealing with Apple stuff for nearly 2 decades now (ugh.) If something goes wrong, either I can fix it, or he has an Apple Store practically across the street from him.

He showed some slight interest in Apple when one of his drinking buds praised them up and down the street. I think at the end of the day, he wants to stay with Windows. I'm fine with that, but Windows 8 has obviously been a huge issue for people (for the record, I think it's decent.)

I can understand the resistance to change. But is he aware of the security holes that exist in XP and older versions of IE? Unless the virtualization setup can deal with this, your father may be setting himself up for some real heartburn.

My dad's running a 9 year old Dell laptop with Win XP. Given the artifacts showing up on the monitor, it's not long for this world. He's going to need a new computer soon.

Unfortunately, he's likes learning new things the way a snowman likes sunbathing: it results in a complete meltdown. Switching to Windows 7 will be a painful nightmare, let switching to a tablet or a Mac.

While it doesn't answer your question, let me share this with you: My grandfather was in the same situation when he was approaching 75 and not very enthusiastic about learning something new. I ignored it, bought him a Mac and he's been over the moon since having learnt to make photo books and other things he never thought possible. Don't underestimate the joy and motivation that can come from learning something useful (as opposed to learning something that just replaces what I already knew).

And in case this sounds like lots of work on my part teaching all that: Apple's One on One program has very, very patient teachers.

Appreciate the feedback. My dad is the same age as your grandpop. Encouraging to hear that he's enjoying the Mac. That's my preferred route, as I've been dealing with Apple stuff for nearly 2 decades now (ugh.) If something goes wrong, either I can fix it, or he has an Apple Store practically across the street from him.

He showed some slight interest in Apple when one of his drinking buds praised them up and down the street. I think at the end of the day, he wants to stay with Windows. I'm fine with that, but Windows 8 has obviously been a huge issue for people (for the record, I think it's decent.)

I can understand the resistance to change. But is he aware of the security holes that exist in XP and older versions of IE? Unless the virtualization setup can deal with this, your father may be setting himself up for some real heartburn.

I've told him several times about the security holes and the upcoming end-of-life of XP. Doesn't' care; he's taking the "That'll never happen to me" approach. This is from a guy who got bit by SpyAxe and a Comcast phishing scam.

Part of the problem is that I convinced him to run Nod32, which I think is one of the better antivirus programs out there. He's thinks he's bulletproof.

He's a really smart guy, but it's like dealing with John C. Dvorak: every new thing sucks because it's new, and therefore it sucks. That's why the virtualization route seems so tempting; for all he knows, he'd be running XP.

I love VMware, and really really really want to be able to use Fusion; however my primary application involves stellar GPU performance/passthrough. VMware Fusion has lagged behind parallels in this area in the past, and while i hate parallels businesses practices, i need the GPU performance in the vm's i'm running with as little overhead as possible.

"This may help VMware recoup some money from consumers who have used Fusion for work, perhaps not knowing that it wasn't licensed for commercial use. "We very well know there are millions of people out there who have [done that], and our intent is to provide them with a path to become legitimate," Joel said."

This does not make any sense to me. Fusion is not licensed for commercial use? I certainly did not know this and what about the version I'm running called "VMware Fusion Professional Version 5.03"? Bit of a dodgy name if it can't be used commercially.

Still don't understand why they won't make a VMWare Player for OS X. Well, I do understand WHY they won't, but that doesn't make it any less of a pisser. "Oh, you bought a Mac so you obviously prefer spending money, we shall accommodate you by not even offering the free option we offer to everyone else. You're welcome."

On Windows or Linux hosts, Player does everything I need from a VM. In fact, it does everything Fusion does, at least for my usage, perhaps there is some obscure feature of Fusion that I'm unaware of that Player doesn't do? Yet Fusion costs $50+ and Player is free. Uh, what?

My question here is : where, exactly, are people getting legit copies of win XP nowadays to install in these virtual machines? Or Vista or 7 for that matter. I'd love to run windows, but I've never found a semi decent way to be legitmate and run Windows without coughing up hundreds of dollars for licenses that expire if you need to reinstall (and you will with a testing virtual machine)--how do people deal with that?

You don't have a half-dozen or so OEM XP discs lying around?

I just ripped one of my OEM XP Pro SP2 discs to an iso, and use that to install my VMs. I have at least 6 legit OEM license keys if I go digging for them in the "old computer shit I should probably hold onto" bin, but for my purpose I just have one of them in a text file next to the iso so it's readily available whenever I need it.

Never liked Vista, but I do have an OEM Vista Home disc from a computer that I immediately wiped/reloaded with XP. And for Windows 7, I bought a Pro upgrade that was around $30 way back on a promo offer. It came as a digital river exe who's sole purpose was to download the iso for burning to disc or putting on a USB stick for installation.

The lingering question now, though, is whether the Windows Activation servers will continue activating XP after support shuts down in April. I only use XP now in VMs to play some older Windows games that don't work so well in 7. I don't want to go the illegitimate route, but if the activation servers won't activate my legitimate software... And if the activation servers aren't activating XP anymore, what about Windows 7 Pro/Ultimate users that are using XP Mode? I found a PC World article where they cite Microsoft saying activations will continue, so hopefully that's indefinitely, and not some limited time frame.

My question here is : where, exactly, are people getting legit copies of win XP nowadays to install in these virtual machines? Or Vista or 7 for that matter. I'd love to run windows, but I've never found a semi decent way to be legitmate and run Windows without coughing up hundreds of dollars for licenses that expire if you need to reinstall (and you will with a testing virtual machine)--how do people deal with that?

Some are pirating. Others are MSDN subscribers, making shady use of their "developer" licenses. Others use an old license -- which could be a legitimate full retail license, or it could be tied to an OEM machine, (which isn't licensed to be installed on another computer, even if you remove it from the original) or could be an upgrade copy (which isn't licensed to be installed without a pre-existing installation of a "qualifying" version... and then it gets even more complicated). Then there's people like me*, who just do a quick Google search, and then buy a license for Windows 7 on Amazon. (You can also find them on other websites, of course.)

My point is, there are a myriad of different easily accessible options, both legitimate and shady... and regardless of the legitimacy, the reality is, almost all of these options will work just fine inside of Fusion or Parallels.

* Technically speaking, my commentary is only peripherally related to this virtualization discussion, as I'm using Win7 exclusively from Bootcamp. But that's really just quibbling, so forget I said that.

Fusion insisted on using the discrete video card on my MacBook Pro, rather than the lower-power integrated video.

++ While this would be nice, I gave up on it. All of the newer, cool OSX apps use the new Core-something APIs to show cool animations when deleting an e-mail or similar. All of those APIs use discrete video, so as apps get prettier, we're just going to live permanently in discrete land until Apple changes things under-the-hood.

I really hope VMware fixed the virtual networking in 6. In 5, they overhauled the networking guts of Fusion (and mostly it's better), but they left a bug. Anytime an external link status changes on your mac, Fusion *completely restarts* the entire internal virtual network. At most, it should be a simple update to the routing tables. The result (for me) is that all of my SSH windows and every mac app running that is accessing a file on the VMs via NFS hangs for 30-60 seconds.

I used VirtualBox for a couple years before switching to Fusion. Then just a couple months ago, I was working on a flight and noticed that Fusion insisted on using the discrete video card on my MacBook Pro, rather than the lower-power integrated video. I got about 90 minutes of work in before my battery was gone. VMWare support confirmed there was no workaround for this, and couldn't give me a date when they'd offer this feature, so I switched to Parallels. Still can't tell from the info on the new Fusion release if the new version is able to use integrated video. I've been happy with Parallels, and both Parallels and Fusion seem to offer comparable features for my uses.

You can lock your card on the integrated one (just do it before you start VMWare, otherwise it will indicate a switch but still be on discrete). Cody is responsive to email and seems like a genuinely nice guy. The software is used by lots of people.

"This may help VMware recoup some money from consumers who have used Fusion for work, perhaps not knowing that it wasn't licensed for commercial use. "We very well know there are millions of people out there who have [done that], and our intent is to provide them with a path to become legitimate," Joel said."

This does not make any sense to me. Fusion is not licensed for commercial use? I certainly did not know this and what about the version I'm running called "VMware Fusion Professional Version 5.03"? Bit of a dodgy name if it can't be used commercially.

According to VMware, Fusion is an either-or license, depending on who buys it. If you are a person, your license lets you use it for personal, non-commercial use on all your personally-owned Macs. If you are a company, you may use it for commercial purposes, but only on one company-owned Mac per license.

I've always preferred Fusion over Parallels. I like the support from VMWare better.

What support? No, seriously. For example, my Fusion 5 is well outside the VMware corporate-like support (for a consumer product) time period, so I'm not allowed to even talk to them. I post to their Fusion forum about the networking bug I've already mentioned here. I get some grossly uninformed responses from VMware users, but nothing from VMware. Now, I'm stuck. Should I upgrade to 6 Pro just so I can file a support ticket that will probably not be fixed any time soon? I guess I'll stick with 5 until I'm compelled to upgrade for some reason. I really get the impression that VMware doesn't care about their consumer/professional customers of Fusion. You have to create an account at vmware.com just to find the place to submit a support ticket to eventually figure out that you can't. They may actually care about their customers, but their actions speak to their overwhelming disinterest.

As a user of vmWare Workstation 8 and Parallels 8, it's great to see competition between the two companies that leads to tangible progress and innovation. I first used Fusion until version 3 due to Parallels business practices and technical issues, but have used Parallels Desktop since version 7 - it has been a really solid product (and Parallels has become a better company).

Still, I have a long wish list for both. I think the holy grail is a bare-metal hypervisor with extensive hardware support that enables almost all guest OSs equally and agnostically. ESXi sort of does this, but it is a not a desktop product, and it has only very limited hardware support. There have been one or two other attempts from minor players, but only a Parallels or vmWare can pull this off (Oracle could care less).

I think there are others like me who would love to have near-native seamless performance of multiple, concurrent VMs which coexist and complement each other, instead of forcing a master-slave (host-guest) relationship. In other words, OS egalitarianism on the desktop. This may still happen in my lifetime, but by then tablets and phones (and their evolutionary offspring) may rule the world, and it may not matter much.

Also, it's good to see an article from Ars related to desktop computing and PCs from time to time. The ongoing focus on the worldwide tech-spy political drama is spiritually exhausting (but is still interesting).

This does not make any sense to me. Fusion is not licensed for commercial use? I certainly did not know this and what about the version I'm running called "VMware Fusion Professional Version 5.03"? Bit of a dodgy name if it can't be used commercially.

According to VMware, Fusion is an either-or license, depending on who buys it. If you are a person, your license lets you use it for personal, non-commercial use on all your personally-owned Macs. If you are a company, you may use it for commercial purposes, but only on one company-owned Mac per license.

That's some convoluted licensing. I'm a virtualbox user who was contemplating buying Fusion but I'm going to avoid it now as I can't guarantee that I won't use it for commercial purposes.